Toni Griffin: A new vision for rebuilding Detroit
Of course, Detroit’s economic collapse was not solely brought about by bad management, but is the result of larger global economic shifts. In a post-industrial economy, as manufacturing has evolved and established itself overseas, Detroit needs to figure out its new place in the new world.

“There is a future for the next generation of Detroiters, both those there now, and those that want to come,” she says in her talk. “Let’s not focus on what Detroit is, but what it can be.”

As part of this week’s “Invented Here” series, the TED Blog interviewed Griffin about the challenges that Detroit faces as it transitions to a post-industrial economy. The real key, she says: support local entrepreneurship and the burgeoning creative economy. An edited version of our conversation follows:

What’s your involvement with Detroit Works?

I worked on the whole planning piece, which is Detroit Future City, published in December 2012. It’s a series of strategies around six planning elements: economic growth, land use, neighborhoods, city systems, public land and civic engagement.

And where is that project now?

We have a series of strategies for each of these six elements, and now, Detroit Future City’s mission is to partner with the different agencies, nonprofit groups and businesses to implement those strategies. Every sector — from media organizations to corporate business to education — is developing a plan and implementing it.

Obviously there’s a lot going on right now related to the city’s bankruptcy and restructuring. Coming out of the bankruptcy, as difficult as that will be, there is hopefully an opportunity to reconfigure our operations and systems to better support the initiatives of Detroit Future City.

How can you do that?

As an example, we might reconfigure infrastructure such as transportation, water systems, and so on, so it’s better aligned with a more sustainable land-use pattern that promotes density. The goal is to enable neighborhoods in the areas where they’re most viable. What we need to do is realign service delivery, utility systems, transportation systems. For instance, let’s identify the neighborhoods that are dense and active, and make sure they get great bus service.

Detroit has become the poster child for urban decay. How can it build an economy that will survive and thrive in a post-industrial world?

For decades, Detroit has been a mono-economy city, focused on the automobile industry. The region is still very automotive-centered. Both domestic and international automakers have a presence in the Detroit metro region, including two automakers still within the city itself.

There is an opportunity to build on that — for example, by focusing on R&D as it relates to the auto industry and supporting existing small businesses and suppliers. But at the same time, we need to support creating new small businesses and suppliers as part of the larger regional economy.

One of the tenets of Detroit Future City is that it’s not so much about the land use as it is about the city’s larger strategy for economic growth. The key is to build that economic growth within the city limits, so that there’s more revenue generated in the city and for the city — and more opportunities for Detroiters to be employed within the city.

Remember, while Detroit has lost more than 60% of its population since its peak in 1950, it’s experienced an even higher percentage of employment losses. We still have many more residents than we have jobs for them. We need to rebalance the ratio of jobs to residents of the city.

As a great step forward. Goldman Sachs just identified Detroit for its 10,000 Small Businesses program. That will link local Detroit businesses to supportive services and access to capital and capacity for growth.

How can Detroit become a meaningful player in the new global economy?

Well, Detroit has always been a member of the global economy as a real driver of the automobile industry. And that industry has never left the region. Parts of it have left the city, but not the region.

So Detroit is still an important international hub for the automotive industry, with international and domestic businesses located in the region.

What we want to remind people is that we need to re-root some of this industry back into the city itself. Detroit has some of the largest educational institutions in the region, as well as companies, including GM’s headquarters. That keeps Detroit as a viable place for continuing to attract business to the region and the city.

And how does your plan try to bring jobs back to Detroit?

One way is through supporting local entrepreneurship, because we believe that entrepreneurship creates a substantial amount of jobs. We’re also focusing on education. When we visited our sister city of Torino, Italy, another auto-industry town,we found it impressive that the educational sector of R&D there related to the innovation and technologies that create new advancements in the automotive sector. We can do the same with Detroit’s education system; it’s a great opportunity to link back to that larger auto industry.

A third sector is to develop the creative class. There’s a great project now called the Tech Town, which is an incubator of creative R&D firms that have the potential to support all kinds of sectors, including automotive and healthcare. This incubator model is also something we learned from Torino, and it gives us an opportunity to expand and support other kinds of sectors.

What have you learned from rethinking Detroit?

What we realized is that Detroit is richer than one economy. In fact, it’s a network of economies. There’s been a lot of attention in the last year on how the downtown and midtown areas are starting to take on an exciting new life. We’re also seeing efforts to create more housing for new tenants to foster more residential living downtown and to bring more employees back into the city by renovating our classic office buildings.

There’s often a tension between encouraging local development and entrepreneurship and also trying to attract new residents to the city. How do you see these dynamics playing out in Detroit?

That’s always a tension in any city. That’s why we want to really highlight local entrepreneurship development, and I think that takes on a very broad scale. Entrepreneurs can be very small firms producing for the automobile industry — but they could also be a sole proprietor doing advertising and marketing or website development. Or they can be young and creative entrepreneurs who are thinking about new ways to be productive in the city.

Given that the city is 82% African-American, there was also an equity issue on the table about how we intentionally tried to reach out and into the local community to find ways to support those local businesses, from the established business in an office building or shopping strip to the sole proprietor working from home.

There’s always a tension between downtown and the neighborhoods, but it helps to have local business owners invest in their own downtown. What we hope to see is a model with opportunities for local neighborhood businesses and local homegrown entrepreneurs to have locations and visibility within the new downtown space.

When can Detroiters expect to start seeing these changes in action?

You’ll already see that if you walk through Woodward Avenue downtown. There are a lot of very local firms there, and we’re beginning to see some local retail stores. There’s an intentional move to bridge the gap between the downtown neighborhood tension and the outsider/insider tension of new local entrepreneurs.

And I think there really are opportunities to overcome that challenge. Shinola, the watch and bike company that I discussed in the talk, is one of those really great examples. The firm decided to move to Detroit, and in doing so, was committed to creating a staff predominantly made up of local Detroiters. That hopefully extends to how they think about their supply chain and how they’ll partner with other local entrepreneurs.

Robert Gordon and Erik Brynolfsson debated their opposing views of where the economy is headed at TED2013. Last week, they brought the debate to a TED Conversation. Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Last week, TED speakers Robert Gordon and Erik Brynjolfsson joined us for a live, one-hour debate on the future of the US economy. It was a furious hour of typing, with both speakers contributing just over 1,500 words in response to a wide variety of user questions. A few highlights:

Ryan Zeigler asks:

Mr. Brynjolfsson, you stated in your talk that you feel that we need to “race with machines” rather than against them. In what manner do you feel that this effects the future of education?

Erik Brynjolfsson responds:

We really need to reinvent education. My industry has lagged other industries in digitizing. Far behind music and other media, finance, manufacturing, retailing, etc. But that’s good news: lots of room to improve. Digitization of education will do two things:

1. Much higher quality and lower cost as very best teachers and methods reach larger audiences. Examples: superstars like Sal Khan of Khan Academy or physics lessons from best MIT profs at EdX..
2. More importantly, gather enormous data about what’s working and not working. Apply big data techniques to improve teaching methods and to personalize how things are taught. Adapt pace and methods, based on students unique situation. Continuous learning by the educators, not just students. My students are already doing this to optimize ad clicks – can soon do it for education.

Michael Noyes asks:

Capitalism has created more wealth by far for more people than any other system. However, have we reached a point in our technological history when the pendulum must swing back toward more socialist economics to achieve more prosperity for more people?

Robert J. Gordon responds:

You have to distinguish between “socialism” and the capitalist welfare state as exemplified by Sweden, the Netherlands, etc. Socialism involves government ownership of the means of production and was practiced by the postwar UK Labour government which nationalized steel, transport, etc. It was Thatcher’s achievement to reverse all that, and Britain went from being a laggard to one of Europe’s most dynamic economies.

Yes, we need more of a welfare state, particularly to prepare children in poverty to compete in our educational system. Now they are dropping out of high school and condemning themselves to lives of manual labor and unemployment.

Theresa Sanker asks:

When are America’s economic priorities going to shift toward education, saving, and long-term investment, and away from excessive reliance on military power and cheap energy?

Erik Brynjolfsson responds:

When more people like you demand it. Simple as that.

Robert Gordon adds:

Heckman has shown that the problem is not that we don’t spend enough resources on education. Reducing class sizes has no effect. The problem is that educational resources are not distributed evenly. In an ideal world we would get rid of property taxation as the basis for educational finance, since that gives an advantage to communities with wealthy residents. We should have education funded by a nationwide value-added tax.

The problem with our military, besides the needless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is the endless buckets of cash poured into ridiculous projects like the F-35 fighter which has no known enemy to justify its cost. We built the B-17 in WWII for $250,000 per plane!

Finally, what’s wrong with cheap energy? Are you in favor of expensive energy?

]]>http://blog.ted.com/the-future-of-the-u-s-economy-ted-fans-join-in-the-robert-gordonerik-brynjolfsson-debate/feed/3GordonBrynjolfsson-debateajabogdanoffGordonBrynjolfsson-debateThe future of work and innovation: Robert Gordon and Erik Brynjolfsson debate at TED2013http://blog.ted.com/the-future-of-work-and-innovation-robert-gordon-and-erik-brynjolfsson-debate-at-ted2013/
http://blog.ted.com/the-future-of-work-and-innovation-robert-gordon-and-erik-brynjolfsson-debate-at-ted2013/#commentsTue, 23 Apr 2013 14:55:23 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=75002[…]]]>

Robert Gordon: The death of innovation, the end of growth
Economists Robert Gordon and Erik Brynjolffson see very different things when they look at the stagnation of the U.S. economy in recent years. It’s almost as if they’re looking at an optical illusion image – one seeing a candlestick while the other sees two faces just inches apart. In today’s talks, they both outlined their thoughts.

Gordon sees the candlestick — he believes that the growth could be tapering off for good and that our best innovations may be behind us. As he points out, between 1900 and 1960, we went from traveling by a horse and buggy to taking Boeing 707s. But in the sixty years since, we haven’t learned to go any faster at a mass commercial level. What’s wrong? In his talk, he outlines four headwinds which are keeping us from continued growth at the pace of the past two centuries: demographics, education, debt and inequality.

Erik Brynjolfsson: The key to growth? Race with the machines
Meanwhile, Brynjolfsson sees the faces. He says that the stagnation may simply be growing pains as we move from an economy based on production to one based on ideas. He also looks to the past for an example, taking us back 120 years to the Second Industrial Revolution. While all the tools were in place for mass production, it took three decades for productivity to skyrocket. The first generation of managers — who had old ideas about systems and workflows – had to age out of the system for growth to start. This is where Brynjolfsson thinks we are now. He sees another wave of innovation in our future — if humans can learn to work alongside computers and robots in more symbiotic ways.

Click the links above to watch these two fascinating talks. And then watch this 12-minute debate between the Gordon and Brynjolfsson on what it means to work today … and what it will mean in the future.

Do you think we are witnessing the end of innovation? Is growth over? Did either speaker here change your opinion? Explain in the comments.